How Much Does a Phone Charging Kiosk Make? How to Estimate It Without Fooling Yourself

Nobody can honestly tell you how much a phone charging kiosk makes in a month, because the same machine can sit nearly idle in one room and stay busy in the next. Say you put the same $950 countertop station in three rooms, on the assumptions spelled out below. In the first it rents twice a month and never covers its cost. In the second it rents about twice a week and takes about six years. In the third it rents about five times a week and covers its cost in about 17 months. Nothing changed but the rentals.

Below are the formula, a worksheet for one specific venue, and the hypothetical table behind those rooms.

How much a phone charging kiosk makes: the formula

For one station, over one month:

Your net = (rentals × average charge per rental × 80%) − venue share − your costs + screen ads you've actually sold

• Rentals per month. Times someone taps and takes a power bank. Visitors and "impressions" don't count. This input swings the most from venue to venue, and you can't really know it until the station is in the room.
• Average charge per rental. You set pricing per station (per 30 minutes, per hour or per day, plus a daily maximum). At the default $3 per 30 minutes, an hour is $6 and a bank kept all day stops at the default $20 maximum.
• 80%. Your share of what renters pay. JB Charging's 20% covers payment processing, 4G, the software and support, with no monthly fee or SIM bill on top. Your 80% comes before the venue share and your costs. Where the money goes on a power bank rental follows a dollar from the renter's card to your bank.
• Venue share. Many venues host a station as a free amenity for their guests. Others want a cut, and you negotiate it. Either way it comes out of your 80%, not our 20%. How much revenue share to offer a venue covers how to set it.
• Your costs. Replacement power banks list at $200 for 10, about $20 each. Each is rated for 500+ charge cycles, so at the rental counts in this post, banks that walk off cost you more than banks that wear out. Add fuel, your own liability insurance if venues ask for a certificate, and taxes. Stands and mounts are one-time costs that belong with the station price.
• Screen ads. You keep 100% of the ad revenue you sell on your screens. But you find the advertisers yourself, and there's no promise anyone buys. Enter $0 until someone has signed.

The estimation worksheet

Fill this in for one specific venue, not for "a bar" in general. Where you're unsure of a line, start from the bad case.

Here's line A worked through. Say the bartender at a late-night bar tells you 2 or 3 guests ask to charge a phone on a busy night, and the bar has about 10 busy nights a month. That's 20 to 30 asks. Not everyone who asks will pay; some borrow a cable, some head home. For the bad case, assume 1 in 4: about 6 rentals a month. That's your planning number.

Price your time per station, not per trip. Say a two-hour loop services 8 nearby stations twice a month: that's 30 minutes per station per month. Spread the same stations 40 minutes apart and your time swallows the net. Cluster your venues.

The same $950 station in four rooms (hypothetical)

Here's the worksheet run four times for one hypothetical J8 Pro, on these illustrative assumptions:

• Station cost about $950. One J8 Pro from the 5-pack ($4,499.95 list price at the time of writing) plus its share of the bundle's $245 shipping, as shown at checkout.
• Average charge per rental $5, between a half hour ($3) and a full hour ($6) at the default price.
• Venue share of 10% (a hypothetical, not a standard rate), which leaves you 70%.
• Costs of $15 a month, for a replacement bank every few months plus fuel. That's deliberately low: it leaves out taxes, insurance, a stand or mount, and your time, all of which lengthen every row.
• No ad revenue.

None of these rows is a prediction. Revenue isn't guaranteed, a station can earn less than its costs, and venues can say no.

Flip it around. On these assumptions you keep $3.50 a rental, so about 5 rentals a month only covers your $15 of costs. About 16 a month (4 a week) covers the $950 in two years. About 27 a month, a little under 1 a day, covers it in one year. Ask honestly whether this venue can produce that.

• The 8-rental row is the trap. It brings in money every month and still takes about six years to cover the machine, twice the length of the 3-year limited warranty.
• Rentals move the result more than anything else. Going from 8 to 20 rentals a month cuts the wait by more than four and a half years. To get the same result from price alone, you'd have to raise the average rental from $5 to about $12.50 and keep every renter.
• Plan on the first two rows until a venue proves otherwise. If the purchase only works at 60 rentals a month, it doesn't work. Size your first order so you could live with the 2- and 8-rental rows.

One change at a time

Start from the 8-rental row ($13 net, about 73 months) and change one input:

Compare the venue-takes-20% row with the offline row. The bigger venue cut costs you $4 a month. Half a month dark costs $14 and puts the station underwater. So a venue asking for 20% isn't the big threat to your numbers. A station nobody checks on is.

Towers follow the same math at a different scale. A J24 Pro lists at $3,299, and freight at checkout was $250 at the time of writing, so it's about $3,550 with shipping. To match the 20-rental row's 17 months, it needs about $205 a month net: on the same assumptions, roughly 63 rentals a month, about 2 a day. Put towers in rooms that can produce that: big, busy, and full of people waiting.

Why the numbers you see online mislead

Averages hide the shape

In our experience, rentals across a network are lopsided: a handful of strong venues produce a big share, and many stations do little. Picture a hypothetical fleet of 10 stations. One sits in a packed late-night bar and does 90 rentals a month. Another does 30, and the other eight do 3 each. The average is 14.4 rentals a month, but the median is 3. A seller who quotes the fleet average isn't lying, yet eight of the ten stations never get near that number.

If a seller quotes you a figure, ask whether it's the median or the average, which venue type it comes from, and whether it's what renters paid or what the operator kept. That's why this post gives you a method, not a per-station figure. Results swing too much by venue for one number to be honest, so build the estimate for the venue in front of you.

Calculators show gross

Many revenue calculators, ours included, show gross: what renters pay before anyone takes a share. Our calculator is useful for scenarios, but its output is a year of gross across all the machines you enter, so divide it by 12 and by the number of machines to get line C on the worksheet. It asks for weekly rentals per machine, so enter line A divided by about 4.3, then work down through lines D to J.

Be wary of any calculator that starts from foot traffic and applies a percentage: 10% of a bar's 300 guests a night is 30 rentals a night from one countertop box. What counts is how many guests are running low, staying a while, and willing to tap a card. Ask the bartender how many people asked to charge a phone last Friday.

Case studies show the standout

A case study features a company's strongest venue, which is its job. Treat it as the top of the range, not the middle of it.

Stations owned aren't stations earning

We've seen a business-for-sale listing for a phone-charging startup with more than 100 stations. By the listing's own description, only a few were deployed and running, so the business was those few stations. Multiply your estimate by stations that are placed, online and stocked, never by stations bought.

The $950 above assumes all five stations in the bundle get placed. Buy a single J8 at list ($1,199.99 plus $35 shipping at checkout, about $1,235) and every row takes about 30% longer. Buy the 5-pack and place only 3, and each placed station carries about $1,580 of hardware, which stretches the 20-rental row from about 17 months to about 29. Before you buy, count the venues that have said yes, not the ones you hope will.

What moves each input

Venue type and dwell time (line A). In our experience, late-night bars, hotels and mall concourses do far better than gyms, offices and clinics. Rentals come from places where people stay a while, away from their own charger, and need their phone for tickets, payments or the ride home. A five-minute stop at a coffee counter is too short.

Hours (line A). A venue open until 2am covers the hours when phones have been in use all day and the ride home still depends on one. One that closes at 9pm misses them.

Placement inside the venue (line A). Put the station where people see it from where they sit and wait: the restroom path, the entrance, the host stand. Keep it out of exit paths, off extension cords and out from behind pillars. Our 10 placement rules go further.

Pricing (line B, and sometimes A). You set it per station. A higher price raises line B and may lower line A; some operators charge more than the default where demand is high. Change one thing at a time and give it a full month before you judge it.

Staying online and stocked (line A). On any day a station is offline, has a dead card reader, or has no charged banks, it makes little or nothing, and the offline row above shows how fast that adds up. The portal flags offline stations, card-reader problems and low or empty banks.

After 30 days, replace your guesses

Once a station has been live and stocked for a month, stop guessing line A. The portal shows each venue's revenue for the last 7 and 30 days, with a trend. Put the real 30-day revenue into line C (divide it by your average charge if you want line A) and re-run line J.

One month is one month, though. A beach bar in July and the same bar in February are different stations, so re-run the worksheet as the seasons change. But if a station that was online and stocked all month, in a normal month for that venue, still lands near 2 rentals a month, waiting won't fix that. It's a placement problem. Move the station to a better spot in the venue or to a different venue.

Next step

Fill in the worksheet for two or three venues you have in mind, then bring it to a call with our team. We won't quote you an earnings figure. We'll go through your inputs with you, bad case included, and tell you which spots we'd worry about. Current list prices are on the stations page.

Examples are illustrative only, not a forecast or a typical result. What a station earns depends on the venue, placement, pricing, local demand, and how actively you run it.